Is Earthing a Woo-Woo thing or is there actual science behind it?

By Úrsula Carranza Peñaranda

Even though I happened to have a fairly supernatural life as a kid, I had a very skeptic mind. The only reason I didn´t doubt my mental sanity was because a number of the supernatural events I had witnessed or had happened to me, were witnessed as well by other people. Other than that, I had a hard time to believe in a number of stuff. I still don´t believe in astrology, at least not like most of people like to address it saying things like, oh, you´re a Leo, that´s why you´re like this. But before they had said that, I had to ask, okay, you know me, you don´t know my birthday, can you tell me by my behavior what zodiac character am I? They had three chances to guess. Never ever anyone won that game. Ever.

I also have a past of being a biology student for a while and a young militant of a Marxist party. All of that made my skepticism flourish. I even declared myself a materialist and, since I had no prove, I also went all the way to really being an atheist.

But weird unexplainable things kept happening to me. Things that at the time -we´re talking about the 80´s and 90´s, science was not interested in studying yet... or if scientists did performed studies on those supernatural events, they were not that eager of publishing so not to be labeled as woo-woo.

Above all, I have an analytic mind. It makes me laugh some times when people describe themselves as very analytical. And I analyze a little bit of their thinking and behavior and what I get to notice is usually they are very observative of certain details, or they apply analysis to what they already have catalogued as a fact. Then I say, let me stop you right there. Analysis is just a faculty of the mind. We develop it. And it means you separate in distinctive parts a piece of information or affirmation or a corps, by function, characteristics, shape, etcetera. Then you have results. And then by your experiences or personality or by your own interests, you judge or catalogue those results. Any piece of information or any matter, as woo-woo as it may sound, is susceptible -not necessarily worthy, of analysis. For instance, I may think that certain hypothesis is full of shit and that might be my opinion, but the only way I could start disproving it would be by setting at least one experience of it. That´s how the real scientific mind works. I understood a biologist is not the one sitting in a library learning only from books and scientific papers, but the person who is constantly experiencing life, either in a lab or outside. So, I set myself into a number of experiments just to prove what I was studying in college and contrast that data with official political propaganda about health. However, this is another story. I only would say: our bodies and immune systems are far stronger than most of our governments and official institutions want us to believe.

By the beginning of this year I was tired of Netflix, I was tired of Prime, TV is not really my thing and I felt every new sitcom that came to my life wasn´t worthy of my attention. I decided to subscribe to Gaia and watch documentaries on healthy lifestyle. Anyway, I was a number of weeks scrolling down the Gaia suggestions for me, and all I could find of interest was Yoga, maybe some meditation, and Rewired from Dr. Dispenza. All the rest was stuff I wasn´t really eager to watch now. Earthing documentaries kept on popping up. I thought, what a woo-woo practice! In Spanish we call pachamamis all those kind of new age people who were born in western civilization but believe themselves as chamans who are connected to the Pachamama and whatever else. Most of them actually make me look some other direction, I find those stuff boring and so not worthy of analysis. I even set myself into a couple of pachamamis experiences and I was so bored and felt almost everyone involved was a little too intense for my taste. One day I was really looking forward for a new documentary and I decided to give it a try. All of the sudden I found myself watching three documentaries on earthing on a row: The Earthing Movie, The Grounded and Heal for Free. It was very interesting to me that the filmmakers were doing this for ethical reasons, and because the results of having experiencing earthing practices for themselves and their loved ones literally had improved or even saved their lives.

The fact that every object in the Universe has two poles seems to be undeniable. We know this through physics. So, when one of the movies reminded me that our Ionosphere is the positive pole of Earth, and Earth itself -or its solid part, is the negative pole, it made sense. I remember as a kid having experienced electric shocks. I was fascinated by electricity and I would ask my father, a chemical engineer, everything about it all the time. I remember knowing that if you´re stepping into water and there´s an electric shock there, your rubber footwear may save your life because you´re not “grounded”. You are like a bird standing on a high voltage wire. It doesn´t get electrocuted because it is not being conductive. Okay, however, proving easily that being a conductive body doesn´t mean that your body is an electromagnetic object capable of having two distinctive poles which is the basic pilar for the earthing hypothesis. Well, sort of. We “have” to be electromagnetic in some way due that we are mostly water, and water molecules are charged with both negative and positive poles. This electromagnetic characteristic of water is what enable its molecules to form diverse structures and behavior. We also have other elements in our bodies. I dare to say that all of them have electromagnetic properties. That means that if at least my body wouldn’t behave like a small earth with two poles, it must have some of the properties of its most abundant elements.

Earthing or grounding is based on the hypothesis -or maybe theory, that due to our lack of connection to Earth, and constant exposure to electronic devices and modern pollution, we are stuffed with excess energy that may cause inflammation on our tissues, including our neurons. Before the 60's, when plastic and rubber soles were invented, we didn´t have the number of issues we have today. That means, if we get more exposure to our connection with Earth, we decompress, we are able to get rid of that excess of energy and stress, and all conditions related to inflammation may improve. Going back to the human body as a binary polar perspective, we need grounding so that our electromagnetic charge is naturally regulated by the negative charge of Earth. This was the long story made short.

Then I remembered something that happened to me. I was already a mom, an aerial silks performer and a philosopher when I suffered the most terrible brake up of my life. I was depressed for two years. I had constant horrible migraines, they made me throw up, and if I was not doing stuff with my kids or working, I was crying in bed. I only didn´t kill myself because that would´ve been devastating for my whole family, and I loved them so much that I never tried. But living was unbearable. Behind our apartment, there was a beautiful garden with an old tipuana tree. I used to have aerial silk trainings and picnics there very often with my students before the brake up. I had stopped doing that since I couldn´t have any social life. One of the things I used to do to get rid of all the sadness and heaviness so I could be functional for work and for my kids was running. I would run everyday for 20 minutes. I was crying the whole time, sobbing, and I would always pass that tree. One day I said, okay, tomorrow, once I come back from work, I´m going to climb the tree with a book and be there for a while. So I did. The moment I sat down, I felt good. I wasn’t miserable. I wasn´t remembering the past. I was enjoying myself. I didn´t attribute this instant emotional change to the tree, but to the fact I was doing something I really loved for myself. But one day, it hit me: there were a bunch of stuff I actually started doing for myself that eventually made me feel good but nothing was that drastic. Just for the sake of it, I tried something I always saw as the hippiest thing ever: hugging trees. A part of me said, come on, get out! No way you´re going to try this, the tree hugging is the woo-wooest of the woo-wooest. But I had to. So I left, I went to the garden, and swallowing my pride, I hugged the tree. I have to say it wasn’t as fantastic as to be actually on top of it, but I felt loved… Loved! I felt happy. How crazy was that! But I have to tell you, I am not a new age hippy, I am simply not.

It may be then that the tree was grounded. But in those terrible magnificent moments I also felt that the tree was alive, more like alive-conscious. And yes, I feel I am going beyond “science”, but at this point, what matters are results. And those results were astonishing.

I have nothing else to say except this: science is about experience and finding truths for the sake of humankind. A real scientist is willing to experience anything that doesn´t compromise their ethics. A real scientist deserves awards, recognition and of course to get the money they deserve for their hard work. But above all, a real scientist never sells their soul for money. If you´re a ´scientist’ working for a huge pharmaceutical company that is only focused on profit, you´re just a slave of greed. And science is for all of us, it wants to get us closer to truths, it means we need and must experience something before denying it.

What I mean is this. I can´t tell you earthing is science. I can´t tell you either that it is a woo-woo stuff. You have documentaries and papers proving and disproving it. What I can tell you is this: are you going to be a slave of external information or are you going to unleash the real scientist in you and make experiences or experiments for yourself? If you have any doubts, just try. Of all the things you may, earthing is the safest one. The worst thing that could happen to you is literally nothing. But what if you come up with fantastic results? You´ll never know unless….